Steven Aitchison

Steven Aitchison, the creator and narrator of the guided meditations at Guided Mind, is the author of 4 books and 10 guides. His blog, Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life, is the No.1 personal development blog in the UK, with over 21,000 subscribers.

Aitchison discovered that our thoughts influence our life (hence the name of his blog) in his early 20s after reading Think and Grow Richby Napoleon Hill. He understood that he needed to change his beliefs, and soon found that the best way do that was guided meditation. After seeing that it works, and that it can help other people as well, he decided to create GuidedMind.com, where he presents over 150 guided meditation programs in different areas of personal development.

Life and Career

Steven Aitchison was born in 1968 in Scotland, UK.

By his own account, he was hopelessly self conscious, quite a serious person who didn’t really know who he was or what he stood for in his youth. However, after what he calls his “awakening” (discovery of Napoleon Hill’s book and realizing his true potential) he found out that what he really wanted to do in life was to help others “stop getting so down about themselves that they feel life is not worth living”.

He first went into nursing in 1994, wanting to become a mental health nurse, but he dropped out of nursing college in 1996. He later attended university in Glasgow while working in a call center. He gained his BSc in Psychology in 2000.

Aitchison continued to work full time in a call center, moving up the ladder, but he felt he wasn’t happy, so he changed to working as an addiction counselor helping clients overcome their alcohol and drug problems, which brought him a lot less money, but he was a lot happier because, as he says, “I just knew that teaching others about the lessons I had learned in life in such a direct way was the way I needed to go”.

That’s also the reason why he started his personal development blog, Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life in August 2006. The blog soon gained hundreds, then thousands of subscribers; Aitchison continued to work full time as an addiction worker, but he soon realized that the internet was a powerful way to bring in extra income and started focusing on creating and marketing self help products.

Recently he started Guided Mind, a website where he presented over 150 guided meditation recordings, all of them written and narrated by himself. The recordings deal with improving all aspects of life, like fighting addictions, phobia elimination, health improvement and, of course, development of manifestation mindset.

Aitchison lives with his wife and two sons in West Scotland, UK.

Teachings and Philosophy

In his early 20s Aitchison came across the book Think and Grow Rich! by Napoleon Hill, which was the turning point in his life, his “awakening” that showed him that his thoughts were his own creation. He says:

If my thoughts were my own creations then my feelings were my own creations, and if my feelings were my own creations then my behavior and actions were my own creation, and what made all these thoughts, beliefs and actions form was the images and movies I played in my mind day in and day out…. A huge revelation.

Since 1990s Aitchison continuously worked on improving himself and his life using the principles of the Law of Attraction. Apart from Napoleon Hill’s, he mentions another book that helped him realize how to achieve his goals: after reading Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain, he started applying the techniques in it.

He soon found that guided meditation was the most powerful way to clear his mind of the images and movies he played in it, and to establish new, positive beliefs. He started looking for guided meditations to help him grow, but he wasn’t happy with what he found.

After mastering the art of guided meditation and learning that he could pretty much do anything he wanted to when he put his mind to it, after the success he had with his blog, he decided to test what worked for him and did a small series of 10 guided meditation audio recordings. The series did very well, so he knew other people could really benefit from his knowledge and decided to build something on a bigger scale – which is the work he presents at GuidedMind.com.

He believes that you can realize many of your dreams in life by following a simple formula:

Change your thoughts, change your beliefs, and take action on the things you want in life!

This change however can’t happen overnight; you change your thoughts and beliefs by changing the images and movies you play in your head every day, and he believes that guided meditation is by far the best way of doing this, as it combines meditative techniques for achieving the Theta state of mind with creative visualization of our goal, helping people to manifest their dreams from the place of deep calm and relaxation.

Books

Steven Aitchison has written 4 books and 10 guides in the fields of personal development and blogging. The titles of his self-improvement work are:

100 Ways To Develop Your Mind: The Psychology Of The Mind And How To Develop Your Mind To Change Your Life (2009)

Making Friends: 8 Steps to making friends quickly and easily: How to make friends and be comfortable with yourself (2010)